Chelovek s kinoapparatom (Man With A Movie Camera)
1929 · Silent · Documentary
Man with a Movie Camera (1929): Dziga Vertov's Soviet city symphony, no plot, no actors, no intertitles. Watch the silent documentary free online, no account.
A day in a Soviet city, from empty streets at dawn to the crowds at night, with no story, no actors and not one intertitle. Vertov's brother Mikhail Kaufman is the cameraman you keep seeing inside the film, hauling the tripod up chimneys and setting it down in the path of a train, and Vertov's wife Elizaveta Svilova is the woman at the bench cutting the footage you are watching.
Nearly every trick in it was new in 1929: split screen, stop motion, freeze frames, superimposition, a camera that gets up and walks on its own legs. It was made for VUFKU in Ukraine and written off at the time as formalist showing off.
Free to watch via internet-archive.
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